Stark and Powerful Russian Film

If the show at the newly reopened Fine Arts Theatre can be labelled propaganda, so can much of the output of American studios. While the Artkino releases boom the Soviet way of life and the Russian character, Hollywood extols its conception of the average American community. Hollywood's presentation is more polished, but the Russian films have an elemental directness that American moviemakers can rarely capture.

In "The Rainbow," the siutation of German occupation that has been tackled by our own studies is treated by the Russians with a force that superior technical resources have failed to reach. The movie is full of the invective and vitriol that current Russian art, in all forms, is expressing. In American interpretations, the stark brutality of the German (in "The Rainbow" they shoot ten - year - old boys, torture pregnant women, and hang a Russian to every icy telephone pole) is never so bitterly approached. In this movie is concentrated the basic source of the European attitude toward the Nazis; and it is easy to see why the American attitude is still a consideration of alternative solutions.

While "The Rainbow" lauds the resistance of the Russian partisans, a shorter co-feature, "Leningrad Music Hall," points to Soviet efforts and artistic successes in peacetime life. While it is pretty well chopped up, the picture has many intervals of greatness; its artistic appeal is universal, and avoids the language barrier necessarily present to some extent in "The Rainbow."